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Verso staff picks

We pick our favorite books from Verso's publishing.

Verso Books13 July 2023

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Colby, US Direct Marketing

Capital

by Kenneth Goldsmith

Here is a kaleidoscopic assemblage and poetic history of New York: an unparalleled and original homage to the city, composed entirely of quotations. Drawn from a huge array of sources—histories, me...

The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise

by Georges Perec

Translated by David Bellos

The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise—neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic, and never less than entertaining—is a penetrating vision of the world of office work. As translator David Bel...

Towards a New Manifesto

by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer

Translated by Rodney Livingstone

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote the central text of “critical theory”, Dialectic of Enlightenment, a measured critique of the Enlightenment reason that, they argued, had resulted in fascism...

The Assassination of Lumumba

by Ludo De Witte

Translated by Renee Fenby and Ann Wright

The Assassination of Lumumba unravels the appalling mass of lies, hypocrisy and betrayals that have surrounded accounts of the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba—the first prime minister of the ...

Comments on the Society of the Spectacle

by Guy Debord

Translated by Malcolm Imrie

First published in 1967, Guy Debord’s stinging revolutionary critique ofcontemporary society, The Society of the Spectacle has since acquired acult status. Credited by many as being the inspiration...

In Praise of Disobedience

by Oscar Wilde

Introduction by Neil Bartlett

In Praise of Disobedience draw on works from a single miraculous year in which Oscar Wilde published the larger part of his greatest prose — the year he came into maturity as an artist. Before the ...

Kelly, US Editorial

Taking A Long Look

by Vivian Gornick

For nearly fifty years, Vivian Gornick’s essays, written with her characteristic clarity of perception and vibrant prose, have explored feminism and writing, literature and culture, politics and pe...

Liberalism at Large

by Alexander Zevin

In this landmark book, Alexander Zevin looks at the development of modern liberalism by examining the long history of the Economist newspaper, which, since 1843, has been the most tireless – and in...

Precarious Life

by Judith Butler

In her most impassioned and personal book to date, Judith Butler responds in this profound appraisal of post-9/11 America to the current US policies to wage perpetual war, and calls for a deeper un...

Everything and Less

by Mark McGurl

As the story goes: Jeff Bezos left a lucrative job to start something new in Seattle only after a deeply affecting reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day. But if a novel gave usAmazon.com, ...

Red Valkyries

by Kristen Ghodsee

Through a series of lively and accessible biographical essays, Red Valkyries explores the history of socialist feminism century Eastern Europe. By examining the revolutionary careers of five promi...

The Judge and the Historian

by Carlo Ginzburg

Translated by Antony Shugaar

A bomb, an anarchist’s ‘accidental death’, the murder of a police commissar, and the confession of a former member of Lotta Continua led to seven dubious court cases and a tale of political opportu...

Jennifer, UK Marketing and Publicity

Crooked Plow

by Itamar Vieira Junior

Translated by Johnny Lorenz

Shortlisted for The International Booker Prize 2024'I heard our grandmother asking what we were doing.'"Say something!" she demanded, threatening to tear out our tongues. Little did she know that ...

Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again

by Katherine Angel

Women are in a bind. In the name of consent and empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Yet sex researchers suggest that women’s desire is often slow to emerge. And m...

Revolting Prostitutes

by Juno Mac and Molly Smith

How the law harms sex workers - and what they want insteadDo you have to endorse prostitution in order to support sex worker rights? Should clients be criminalized, and can the police deliver justi...

Is Mother Dead

by Vigdis Hjorth

Translated by Charlotte Barslund

**Longlisted for The International Booker Prize 2023**'To mother is to murder, or close enough', thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian. She's recently widowed a...

The Verso Book of Feminism

Edited by Jessie Kindig

Throughout written history and across the world, women have protested the restrictions of gender and the limitations placed on women’s bodies and women’s lives. People—of any and no gender—have pro...

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

by Andreas Malm

The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a...

Federico, Rights

Futurability

by Franco Berardi

We live in an age of impotence. Stuck between global war and global finance, between identity and capital, we seem to be incapable of producing that radical change that is so desperately needed. Is...

The Essence of Nihilism

by Emanuele Severino

In 1969, Emanuele Severino underwent a Vatican trial for the ‘fundamental incompatibility’ between his thought and the Christian doctrine, and was removed from his position as professor of philosop...

Humankind

by Timothy Morton

What is it that makes humans human? As science and technology challenge the boundaries between life and non-life, between organic and inorganic, this ancient question is more timely than ever. Accl...

Michelle, US Publicity

Troublemaking

by Lydia Hughes and Jamie Woodcock

There has been an explosion of organising among workers many assumed to be unorganisable, from delivery drivers in London to tech workers in Silicon Valley. The culmination of years of conversation...

After Work

by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek

Does it ever feel like you have no free time? You come home after work and instead of finding a space of rest and relaxation, you're confronted by a pile of new tasks to complete – cooking, cleanin...

Revolting Prostitutes

by Juno Mac and Molly Smith

Nick, Production

Fire and Blood

by Enzo Traverso

Translated by David Fernbach

Fire and Blood looks at the European crisis of the two world wars as a single historical sequence: the age of the European Civil War (1914–1945). Its overture was played out in the trenches of the ...

October

by China Miéville

In February of 1917 Russia was a backward, autocratic monarchy, mired in an unpopular war; by October, after not one but two revolutions, it had become the world’s first workers’ state, straining t...

Racecraft

by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields

Praised by a wide variety of people from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Zadie Smith, Racecraft "ought to be positioned," as Bookforum put it, "at the center of any discussion of race in American life." Most p...

The Origin of Capitalism

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

In The Origin of Capitalism, a now-classic work of history, Ellen Meiksins Wood offers readers a clear and accessible introduction to the theories and debates concerning the birth of capitalism, im...

Mark, Managing Editor

The London Hanged

by Peter Linebaugh

Peter Linebaugh’s groundbreaking history has become an inescapable part of any understanding of the rise of capitalism. In eighteenth-century London the spectacle of a hanging was not simply a form...

Promise of a Dream

by Sheila Rowbotham

At the beginning of the decade renowned historian Sheila Rowbotham was a rebellious sixteen-year-old at a Methodist boarding school in the north-east of England, reading Sartre and dreaming of Pari...

Citizens to Lords

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

In this groundbreaking work, Ellen Meiksins Wood rewrites the history of political theory. She traces the development of the Western tradition from classical antiquity through to the Middle Ages in...

Anne, US Sales and Publicity

Radius

by Yasmin El-Rifae

In 2012, the joyful hopes of the democratic Egyptian Revolution were tempered by revelations of mass sexual assault in Tahrir Square in Cairo, the revolution’s symbolic birthplace. This is the sto...

October

by China Miéville

Late Victorian Holocausts

by Mike Davis

Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship betw...

How to Be a Revolutionary

by C.A. Davids

Fleeing her moribund marriage in Cape Town, Beth accepts a diplomatic posting to Shanghai. In this anonymous city she hopes to lose herself in books, wine, and solitude, and to dodge whatever pang...

Revolutionary Yiddishland

by Alain Brossat and Sylvie Klingberg

Translated by David Fernbach

Jewish radicals manned the barricades on the avenues of Petrograd and the alleys of the Warsaw ghetto; they were in the vanguard of those resisting Franco and the Nazis. They originated in Yiddishl...

The Romance of American Communism

by Vivian Gornick

“Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class.” So begins Vivian Gornick’s exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in t...

Rowan, UK Director

Savage Messiah

by Laura Grace Ford

Preface by Greil Marcus

Introduction by Mark Fisher

Savage Messiah collects the entire set of Laura Grace Ford’s fanzine to date. Part graphic novel, part artwork, the book is both an angry polemic against the marginalization of the city’s working c...

The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker

Long before the American Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a motely crew of sailors, slaves, pirates, labourers, market women, and indentured servants had ideas about freedom and...

The Philosophy of Marx

by Étienne Balibar

Translated by Gregory Elliott and Chris Turner

Written by one of political theory’s leading thinkers, The Philosophy of Marx examines all the key areas of Marx’s writings in their wider historical and theoretical context—including the concepts ...

The Unseen

by Nanni Balestrini

Preface by Antonio Negri

Translated by Liz Heron

For a brief explosive period in the mid-1970s, the young and the unemployed of Italy’s cities joined the workers in an unexpectedly militant movement known simply as Autonomy (Autonomia). Its “poli...

The Xenofeminist Manifesto

by Laboria Cuboniks

The Xenofeminist Manifesto is an attempt to articulate a feminism fit for the twenty-first century. Unafraid of exploring the potentials of technology, exploring both oppressive and emancipatory po...

The Mosaic of Islam

by Suleiman Mourad

Today, 23 percent of the global population is Muslim, but ignorance and misinformation about Islam persist. In this fascinating and useful book, the acclaimed writer Perry Anderson interviews the n...

Anjali, UK Marketing

Crippled

by Frances Ryan

In austerity Britain, disabled people have been recast as worthless scroungers. From social care to the benefits system, politicians and the media alike have made the case that Britain’s 12 milli...

Set Fear on Fire

by LASTESIS

After the feminist art collective LASTESIS created their performance "A Rapist in Your Path" in their native Chile, it went viral across the globe, becoming the anthem of the grassroots feminist mo...

Heart Of The Race

by Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe

Introduction by Lola Okolosie

Heart of the Race is a powerful corrective to a version of Britain’s history from which black women have long been excluded. It reclaims and records black women’s place in that history, documenting...

Chris, Data Manager

Restless Cities

Contributions by Marshall Berman, Kasia Boddy, Iain Borden, Rachel Bowlby, Geoff Dyer, Patrick Keiller, Esther Leslie, Michael Newton, Chris Petit, Michael Sayeau, Michael Sheringham, Iain Sinclair, David Trotter and Mark W. Turner

Edited by Matthew Beaumont and Gregory Dart

The metropolis is a site of endless making and unmaking. From the attempt to imagine a ‘city-symphony’ to the cinematic tradition that runs from Walter Ruttmann to Terence Davies, Restless Cities t...

Criticism and Ideology

by Terry Eagleton

Terry Eagleton is one of the most important—and most radical—theorists writing today. His witty and acerbic attacks on contemporary culture and society are read and enjoyed by many, and his studies...

A Short History of 'Cahiers du Cinéma'

by Emilie Bickerton

Cahiers du Cinéma was the single most influential project in the history of film. Founded in 1951, it was responsible for establishing film as the ‘seventh art,’ equal to literature, painting or mu...

The Walker

by Matthew Beaumont

Can you get lost in a crowd? It is polite to stare at people walking past on the street? What differentiates the city of daylight and the nocturnal metropolis? What connects walking, philosophy a...

Leo, UK Editorial

The Seasons of Trouble

by Rohini Mohan

For three decades, Sri Lanka’s civil war tore communities apart. In 2009, the Sri Lankan army finally defeated the separatist Tamil Tigers guerrillas in a fierce battle that swept up about 300,000 ...

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy

by Gabriella Coleman

Here is the ultimate book on the worldwide movement of hackers, pranksters, and activists that operates under the non-name Anonymous, by the writer theHuffington Post says “knows all of Anonymous’ ...

Explore Everything

by Bradley L. Garrett

What does it feel like to find the city’s edge, to explore its forgotten tunnels and scale unfinished skyscrapers high above the metropolis? Explore Everything reclaims the city, recasting it as a ...

Algiers, Third World Capital

by Elaine Mokhtefi

Introduction by Jeremy Harding

Mokhtefi (née Klein), a Jewish American from Long Island, has had an exhilarating life. In the 1960s, she served as a press adviser to the National Liberation Front in postwar Algiers, before going...

Boy 30529

by Felix Weinberg

“Anyone who survived the exterminations camps must have an untypical story to tell. The typical camp story of the millions ended in death ... We, the few who survived the war and the majority wh...

Jeanne, Production Editor

A History of Violence

by Óscar Martínez

Foreword by Jon Lee Anderson

Translated by Daniela Maria Ugaz and John Washington

El Salvador and Honduras have had the highest homicide rates in the world over the past ten years, with Guatemala close behind. Every day more than 1,000 people—men, women, and children—flee these ...

The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-yong

Translated by Sora Kim-Russell

In 1993, writer and democracy activist Hwang Sok-yong was sentenced to five years in the Seoul Detention Center upon his return to South Korea from North Korea, the country he had fled with his fam...

What Is Antiracism?

by Arun Kundnani

Liberals have been arguing for nearly a century that racism is fundamentally an individual problem of extremist beliefs. Responding to Nazism, thinkers like gay rights pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld and...

Daniel, Accounts

China in One Village

by Liang Hong

After a decade away from her ancestral family village, during which she became a writer and literary scholar in Beijing, Liang Hong started visiting her rural hometown in landlocked Hebei province....

Hegel Contra Sociology

by Gillian Rose

Gillian Rose is among the twentieth century’s most important social philosophers. In perhaps her most significant work, Hegel Contra Sociology, Rose mounts a forceful defence of Hegelian speculativ...

Virtue and Terror

by Maximilien Robespierre

Introduction by Slavoj Žižek

Edited by Jean Ducange

Translated by John Howe

Robespierre’s defense of the French Revolution remains one of the most powerful and unnerving justifications for political violence ever written, and has extraordinary resonance in a world obsessed...

Before Stalinism

by Samuel Farber

Before Stalinism is a historical study of democratic life and institutions and their decline in the early years of the Russian Revolution. While attempting to synthesize a wealth of available hi...

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

by Slavoj Žižek

Billions of dollars were hastily poured into the global banking system in a frantic attempt at financial stabilisation. So why has it not been possible to bring the same forces to bear in addressin...

Considerations on Western Marxism

by Perry Anderson

This synoptic essay considers the nature and evolution of the Marxist theory that developed in Western Europe, after the defeat of the proletarian rebellions in the West and the isolation of the Ru...

Tim, US Publicity

Health Communism

by Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant

In this fiery, theoretical tour de force, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant offer an overview of life and death under capitalism and argue for a new global left politics aimed at severing th...

Landscapes

by John Berger

In this brilliant collection of diverse works—essays, short stories, poems, translations—which spans a lifetime’s engagement with art, John Berger reveals how he came to his own unique way of see...

Crooked Plow

by Itamar Vieira Junior

Translated by Johnny Lorenz

Shortlisted for The International Booker Prize 2024'I heard our grandmother asking what we were doing.'"Say something!" she demanded, threatening to tear out our tongues. Little did she know that ...

Working Girl

by Sophia Giovannitti

Sex and art, we're told, are sacred, two spheres that ought to be kept separate from the ravages of the marketplace. Yet both prop up two incredibly lucrative industries, built on the commodificati...

Class War

by Mark Steven

A thrilling and vivid work of history, Class War weaves together literature and politics to chart the making and unmaking of social class through revolutionary combat. In a narrative that spans the...

Abolition Geography

by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore's work from over three decades, Abolition Geography presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, of...

Sebastian, UK Editorial

Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism

by Perry Anderson

Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism is a sustained exercise in historical sociology that shows how the slave-based societies of Ancient Greece and Rome eventually became the feudal societies of th...

Lineages of the Absolutist State

by Perry Anderson

Forty years after its original publication, Lineages of the Absolutist State remains an exemplary achievement in comparative history. Picking up from where its companion volume, Passages from Antiq...

Fossil Capital

by Andreas Malm

The more we know about the catastrophic implications of climate change, the more fossil fuels we burn. How did we end up in this mess?In this masterful new history, Andreas Malm claims it all began...

The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg

by Norman Geras

During the first decades of the twentieth century, Rosa Luxemburg was the leader of the workers’ movement in Poland and Germany. She made a remarkable contribution to socialist theory and practic...

The Limits to Capital

by David Harvey

Now a classic of Marxian economics, The Limits to Capital provides one of the best theoretical guides to the history and geography of capitalist development. In this edition, Harvey updates his cla...

Democracy Against Capitalism

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

Historian and political thinker Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that theories of “postmodern” fragmentation, “difference”, and contingency can barely accommodate the idea of capitalism, let alone subjec...

Anthony, US Publicity

Scorched Earth

by Jonathan Crary

Selected as one of LitHub's 38 Favorite Books of 2022Finalist for the 2022 Big Other Book Award for NonfictionIn this uncompromising essay, Jonathan Crary presents the obvious but unsayable reality...

Mute Compulsion

by Søren Mau

Despite insoluble contradictions, intense volatility and fierce resistance, the crisis-ridden capitalism of the 21st century lingers on. To understand capital’s paradoxical expansion and entrenchme...

Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche

by Henri Lefebvre

Translated by David Fernbach

Henri Lefebvre saw Marx as an ‘unavoidable, necessary, but insufficient starting point’, and always insisted on the importance of Hegel to understanding Marx. Metaphilosophy also suggested the sign...